


Trying on Soft for Size

by swooning



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:42:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swooning/pseuds/swooning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Bill--who can sometimes be a bit of an ass--is a HUGE ass. </p><p>Spoilers for BSG through 4.2, which I refer to as, "The one where Bill was such a huge ass."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trying on Soft for Size

  
_Remember what happened last time her death got close? Forced abortions, airlockings galore. She doesn't have the wiggle room that Bill has, to wait and wonder and see if it's Kara after all. She knows the Fleet doesn't have that time either. And the thing that has always made her scarier than Bill is that she is able to turn off that thing, and make the call. Not a Razor, she's not like that. Just...the Olympic Carrier is always with us. And Laura keeps their names written on a piece of paper, and carries it close to her heart, and that's how she makes the pieces fit._

\- Jacob (the BSG Recapper on "Television Without Pity")

* * *

The fundamental problem was not that Bill had been cruel... the cruelty, ultimately, was not nearly as significant as its cause, which was that Bill was soft, and he really didn't want to be. He hated it, hated to be consumed by caring, by doubt, by questions that had no good answers. It overwhelmed him to be overwhelmed, and he had been out of his depth since the first bomb hit New Caprica. Small wonder it affected him as strongly as it did.

He took it out on the people closest to him, he always had, she knew that. She'd thought herself past needing to rely on someone. But knowing that, when times got tough, he ultimately could no longer be trusted for support - he might suddenly attack her weakest point, either from thoughtlessness, or just to save himself - was disheartening, nevertheless. Nobody else could have done that to her, nobody left alive had that power to hurt her anymore, make her care about the loss of herself. Make her cry. Had he been aware of that? She gave him the benefit of the doubt, at least superficially, but either way the interaction had erased any last shred of hope Laura had that she could ever ease her guard completely around Bill. 

She had needed it, she supposed. A coldly clinical part of her brain ticked away despite the wave of emotion, noting that a good cry was a cathartic and perhaps even necessary part of the process of thinking about things that were painful. The grieving process could not, after all, complete itself without  _grief_. It would happen whether she liked it or not, so perhaps she owed him thanks for giving her this push. His being mean and striking out at her had given her permission to feel sorry for herself. 

Laura would have liked to try on  _soft_  for size. It was a wistful feeling, a slightly regretful shrug of the shoulders, for a possibility that had been lost long before that first Cyclon strike on her home planet.  _Soft_  had not been an option since she started sleeping with Adar; at that point, she had taken her life in a direction that precluded softness, that made vulnerability too dangerous to risk. This may have made her peculiarly suited for her next, unexpected job. However, it made the business of dying horribly lonely, especially as her one friend was so little comfort to her. With Adar, she had grown accustomed to being alone; she had lived alone, and had seen Richard when he had time; she had believed, at the time, that she had made a workable compromise between her desire for privacy and her need to feel desired. 

Now, she had no privacy; she was living with a man for the first time in her adult life - she had had that realization, a few days into the arrangement,  _I am living with a man for the first time_  - and every space she walked through now had been his first. But loneliness, she had in spades. The crushing, horribly acute loneliness of animosity in close quarters, at the moment. Dying was no easier the second time than it had been the first, and she knew that chemotherapy was only postponing the inevitable. Bill's inability to grasp that, and to grasp that she needed to acknowledge the fact of her impending death, was the most painful thing of all. Being unable to talk about, to share it, meant she was alone in her head with it. A head full of death, a body full of death... how could it not come out as tears, at some point? 

Because she was worried that once she started crying, she wouldn't be able to stop, of course. Yet another in a long line of cliches... apparently these hackneyed thoughts and all-too predictable events represented certain unavoidable stops on the road to death. The tears that couldn't stop, and then the embarassing realization that her first thoughts, upon pulling out the hank of hair she still clutched in her hand, had  _not_  been that this loss signaled the beginning of the end. That thought had followed very shortly, of course. But first had been the thought, immediate and vain, that she was going to look so ugly with her hair falling out. She would look like her mother had looked at the end, and that was  _ugly_ , and she burned still with shame to remember how she had been physically sickened at times, when she looked at her mother's dying body and dead hair and the pale exposed scalp that was never meant to be seen. And then a fleeting notion, a note of absurdity, that perhaps she should hand the hair to Bill and see how he reacted, because  _that would show him_. 

And  _then_... the beginning of the end. Another cliche. But fortunately it meant there would be few more left to suffer. And if there were, at least she wouldn't be around to wince and roll her eyes at them, because her own suffering would be over. Or so she had always imagined, anyway... the Gods, of course, might have other plans for her after her demise. She had long since given up any attempt to second-guess them.

The swatch of hair, which hadn't been healthy for some time now anyway, felt crisp and foreign to her fingers. The texture was wrong, the color was off. Once free from her head, it felt as though it couldn't possibly have belonged there to begin with. It was dry, inorganic... dead. She wrapped her hand more tightly around the loose bundle, resisting the temptation to run her fingers through her hair again, to see what would happen. Like picking at a scab, she thought, or wiggling a loose tooth. Peeling flakes of dead skin off a sunburn. Perhaps the body or brain had a natural urge to rid itself of what was dead, what was no longer attached properly, what didn't belong. 

Perhaps it would be better, she mused, to shave it off and be done with it. 

Perhaps not. 

She sniffed back the last of the tears and swallowed firmly, choking down the remainder of her crying jag through sheer force of will and necessity. And then, pushing her glasses securely back up to the bridge of her nose, she bent once more over the work in front of her, and started reading again.

 

 

 


End file.
